The promoted section definitely needs a re-think, and i know that is something that has been proposed by some of the top witnesses recently. What you described is similar to how promotion works on Google or Facebook which would be much better than what we have now.
I could go on about the promoted section for a while, but that’s a topic for another post!
Yeah, I may have to sit down & do a post or two myself! It’s fun to imagine! Other than promoted posts, I do think we should have advertising, albeit in a very user focused & friendly way.
I’d love to see Steemit Inc. partner with a service like Anonymous Ads, a bitcoin based, non intrusive ad management system. Whitelist their links/code (they don’t work on Steemit now... I played around), & get them to accept & transact in Steem & SBD of course.
Then everyone who wanted could put a banner ad in post footers, etc. and we would have the option of buying targeted adspace in relevant blogs, with popular creators, etc. Minus a usual fee, the money goes to other Steemians, value stays entirely in the ecosystem, (and even draws money from outside advertisers into Steem) and our blog content gets a built in continuous revenue opportunity. Anyone who goes over the top with their use of ads would run the risk of being unfollowed and losing support, getting flagged for spam, etc.
Doing webcomics, I used another similar service, Project Wonderful, that could also be a candidate to convert to crypto and partner with. I actually enjoyed managing my ad slots and ad buys and it was far more effective and targeted than any kind of search promotion. When I saw a Project Wonderful ad slot on a popular favorite site of mine, I knew I had the opportunity to place my content directly in front of that audience.
An internal, user driven, user rewarding ad system could replace post promotion or complement it wonderfully and serve as a responsible “workaround” to the 7 day payout limit.